How to Live a Good a Life - Stoic Wisdom & the Founding Fathers - Highlights - JEFFREY ROSEN

"Well, it's important that although you can disaggregate them, they're really clusters of the same quest that they're all glosses on the four classical virtues of temperance, prudence, courage, and justice. And they're all attempts to achieve self-mastery, and in that sense, tranquility, moderation, these are different ways of expressing the ideas of prudence and temperance. It's striking that Adam Smith translated the Roman word temperance with virtue as a kind of tranquility of the soul. When I was rereading the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, I was struck by the idea of the environmental crisis being a kind of self-executing divine retribution for disturbing the harmonies of the universe. There are so many passages in the scriptures which talk about the plagues and fires and punishments that come from failing to respect our place in the universe and having the hubris to imagine that we can transform and thwart the laws of nature. These punishments are self-executing, and we are experiencing them. The way to restore harmony is the way that harmony has always been restored, which is by restraint, humility, and living according to nature."